Psychological Science at Work

The indispensable research blog on the science of the modern workplace, covering everything from leadership and management to the behavioral, social, and cognitive dynamics behind performance and achievement.

The economic instability that has swept the globe over the last six years has largely snuffed people’s confidence in their job security. And that wariness does nothing to improve organizations’ financial success. A 2008 study showed that job insecurity erodes commitment and performance, not to mention health. The pessimism in the workforce could therefore create a vicious cycle of lackluster economic growth; as workers worry about getting pink slips, their productivity declines and profits drop. And as profits drop, workers fret even more about their jobs.

Psychological scientists in Europe recently investigated this possibility, striving to find out the exact reasons people feel insecure about their jobs. Specifically, they wanted to measure how individuals’ personalities, their company’s financial health, or some combination of the two, influence their perceptions about their job stability.

Led by Maike E. Debus of Universität Zürich, the researchers surveyed 640 employees (anonymously) working at 50 small- to medium-sized companies in Switzerland. Even though Switzerland’s jobless rate is low—about half of the 6.3% rate in the United States— surveys show unemployment to be the biggest concern among Swiss people. The respondents came from diverse educational backgrounds and occupational positions, and a small percentage of them were on temporary contracts.

The participants were asked to rate the likelihood of losing their jobs. Additional questions were designed to measure the participant’s general emotional state and their locus of control—the amount of power they feel they have over events that affect them.

Debus and her colleagues also obtained an objective assessment of each company’s financial status by researching independent credit risk scores.

The results showed that personality and locus of control weighed more heavily on people’s job insecurity than did company performance. Moreover, employees on temporary contracts were more worried about their jobs the more they expressed negative attitudes and the less they felt control over events in their lives.

Debus and her collaborators don’t minimize the impact that economic conditions and company performance have on people’s fears about job loss. But they say their study demonstrates the importance of looking at the ways personality and situational factors interact to influence individuals’ perceptions of their job security.

The scientists recommend additional research on contextual factors, such as national GDP and unemployment rates that vary from country to country. But they add that companies should consider that employees’ concerns about job security are not primarily affected by the organization’s performance.

“[I]f managers have to convey certain negative messages,” they write in Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, “they should verbalize them with an unambiguous interpretation, whereby employees have as little wiggle room as possible to fill with their own cognitions.”

At the End of the Day

Sleep to Remember

If you find yourself forgetting detailed instructions from your boss or the time of an important business meeting, you might try remedying the problem with a good night’s rest.

Sleeping not only protects memories from being forgotten, it also makes them easier to access, according to new research from the University of Exeter and the Basque Centre for Cognition, Brain and Language The findings suggest that after sleep we are more likely to recall facts which we could not remember while still awake.

In two situations where subjects forgot information over the course of 12 hours of wakefulness, a night’s sleep was shown to promote access to memory traces that had initially been too weak to be retrieved.

The research, published in the journal Cortex, tracked memories for novel, made-up words learned either prior to a night’s sleep, or an equivalent period of wakefulness. Subjects were asked to recall words immediately after exposure, and then again after the period of sleep or wakefulness.

The key distinction was between those word memories which participants could remember at both the immediate test and the 12-hour retest, and those not remembered at test, but eventually remembered at retest.

The researcher found that, compared to daytime wakefulness, sleep helped rescue unrecalled memories more than it prevented memory loss.

“Sleep almost doubles our chances of remembering previously unrecalled material,” experimental psychologist Nicolas Dumay of the University of Exeter explains. “The post-sleep boost in memory accessibility may indicate that some memories are sharpened overnight. This supports the notion that, while asleep, we actively rehearse information flagged as important.”

Dumay believes the memory boost comes from the hippocampus, an inner structure of the temporal lobe, unzipping recently encoded episodes and replaying them to regions of the brain originally involved in their capture – this would lead the subject to effectively re-experience the major events of the day.

“More research is needed into the functional significance of this rehearsal and whether, for instance, it allows memories to be accessible in a wider range of contexts, hence making them more useful,” he writes.

Immigrant study participants can expose the limitations of “universal” theories that are based exclusively on data from small, homogenous groups, says David Rollock. And immigrants who don’t fit into established ethnic or religious categories spur scientists to refine outdated measures and methodologies. Rollock, along with APS Fellow Gilad Chen, Belinda Campos, Carola Suárez-Orozco, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa, participates in a cross-cutting theme program on immigration.